What Do You Talk About On Your Blog If You Write Fiction?

In today's guest post, I'm delighted to have novelist and book marketing expert Carolyn Howard-Johnson share her creative blogging tips for fiction authors.

It's harder to promote fiction on a blog (or about anything else) than nonfiction, but it's not impossible. Here are some ideas. Note that sometimes you have to make your own news.

1. Review others' books and post the review. Choose ones in the same genre as yours or related to your book in other ways, like setting. Ask the author to promote your review post. If you need more information on this process, read the section on how to promote with your writing in my book, The Frugal Book Promoter, and for everything you need to know on the subject read Mayra Calvani's The Slippery Art of Book Reviewing.

2. Use the voice of your protagonist (or villain) in your post and let him or her tell some new stories, stories not found in your book. Be sure she or he mentions your book during the little story-telling spree.

3. Let your readers endorse your book. Ask them to. Post pictures of them and your book cover and talk about more than the book, make it about them. It could be a feature story of some interesting aspect of their lives or an interview. But interviews are common and if you wrote a feature story, you might end up selling the article to a print periodical or some other media.

4. Talk about trends in your genre. How does your book fit into them?

5. Answer reader's questions. Sometimes readers think of characters as real. Offer to expound or flesh out characters, including minor ones. You may end up using what you write as part of a sequel.

6. It seems obvious from the above but you could explore your next novel and let people weigh in with ideas.

7. Feature or link to the blogs of other authors or other review sites. Ask for reviews of your book on those same review sites.

8. Start an award. Contests are old news and often don't work well. But if you give an award once a year for a book in your genre? Well, I'm just starting to think of the possible benefits inherent with this including an opportunity to send out a media release with some real news in it, cross promotion with the winning author or authors . . . Do you have other ideas for how awards could work? Leave them in the comments. Subscribers would love to hear them.

Oh! A resource for you. Go to Phyllis Zimbler Miller's and my Fiction Marketing page to read the chapter on blogs. There are even more ideas there. It is at www.fictionmarketing.com. And if you know an agent who might be interested in the concept, will you let them know about the site?

Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of several books including This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". Her blogs include Sharing With Writers and Readers; TheNewBookReview, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews; and The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor blog.

Comments

[Carolyn Howard-Johnson]

Such a lovely blog, Dana. Thank you for including me. I'm Tweeting again and our friend Tony Eldridge ran this as part of his Friday blog carnival. (-: Going to run this on Facebook and in my newsletter, too.

By the way, anyone who would like to get my Sharing with Writers newsletter may do so by sending an e-mail with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line to hojonews@aol.com. I'll do the work for you. (-:

Best,
Carolyn

[Kirsten Lesko]

Thanks for the informative post - a lot of great tips in here. I love the tip on posting in your protagonist's voice. And the award is a fantastic idea for its multiple benefits.

I've also heard that you can leverage a nonfiction element of your fiction book. For instance, if you write a novel about Nascar, you can start a blog on the topic. Unfortunately, I have virtually no nonfiction elements in my novel that can be leveraged this way.

[Dana]

Carolyn, thanks for sharing with my readers - you have such wonderful creative ideas!

Great tip, Kirsten - that's one of the reasons that both fiction and nonfiction authors need to think about marketing before writing a book :) Novelists can use several elements of the book as promotional hooks, such as the location or the professions or hobbies of the main characters.

Here are some other posts with tips on fiction marketing:
http://bookmarketingmaven.typepad.com/book_marketing_maven/fiction/

[Carolyn Howard-Johnson]

Yes, Kirsten. Thanks for dropping by with something so useful. Are you sure you don't have something to leverage, though? Not even location?

Best,
Carolyn

[Sarah Butland]

Very good ideas. I just may have to use some of these for my blog, better yet I'll incorporate them all into my blog. Thanks for the insight.

[Dana]

Thanks Sarah and I wish you much success with your book!
Dana

[Delia Latham]

Amazing post! My latest release, Destiny's Dream, is book one in a 3-book series based around a Christian dating agency called Solomon's Gate. It never occurred to me to play up the dating agency aspect for blogging and/or marketing, but you've given me food for thought. Thank you!

[Angela]

These are excellent tips. You've given me an idea to spruce up my blog for my creative non-fiction book Women For All Seasons. I can write posts in my characters' voices. Thank you so much!

[Judith van Praag]

Love this post. As a non-fiction writer I've not had any problem finding material to share with readers. But what to do now that I'm writing a novel? On my FaceBook page I post information that's relevant to the characters in my book, the time frame of the story. You give me more to work with though. Merely formulating that question: "What do you talk about on your blog when you're writing fiction", is worth a million. Sounds like Jeopardy doesn't it? Well this is a million dollar post to me :-)

[Dana Lynn Smith]

Thanks so much Judith - I'm glad you found Carolyn's tips helpful! Good luck with the novel:)

[Carolyn Howard-Johnson]

Dana, I love how your visitors contribute to the conversation. Absolutely. fiction writers can easily attack some aspect of their book (setting, profession of one of the characters, etc) as if they had written a nonfiction book. They become an "expert" in that field. I did that with my novel This Is the Place. I got calls for my take on tolerance, on Utah, on polygamy--even on feminist issues.
As you can tell, I'm passionate about this. So many fiction writers hear that they can't market fiction. It's even sadder when they believe those myths.
Best,
Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Blogging writers' resources at Writer's Digest 101 Best Websites pick www.sharingwithwriters.blogspot.com